Smart Cloud for COVID‑19 Prevention and Control
As we are entering the first of the three-stage provincial and federal reopening phases, AHS urgently needs to have an effective way to prevent and control future waves of the COVID‑19 epidemic until we have a vaccine or completely contain the virus. The objective of this project is to design and develop a Smart (augmented-intelligent) Cloud solution to address this urgent need. There are many forms of prevention and control, in this project, we focus on two specific urgent needs: predictions of COVID‑19 outbreaks and recommendations for preventing and controlling outbreaks. We achieve this by fusing COVID‑19 information and data from various sources, performing deep data analysis and learning, and providing predictions and recommendations for COVID‑19 outbreaks using machine learning techniques.
Alberta Health Services (AHS), as Canada’s first and largest provincewide, fully-integrated health system, tracks COVID‑19 cases for Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan, B.C. and the Northwest Territories. In addition, AHS has direct access to contact tracing data from the ABTraceTogether app – the first and so-far the only contact tracing app adapted in Canada with over 140,000 downloads and growing. Our partnership with AHS will grant us credential access to COVID‑19 data from a very large geographical area and contact tracing data, which gives us a unique advantage to lead the research in COVID‑19 prevention and control.
We will work closely with our collaborators from AHS to design and develop a Smart Cloud solution with three intended outcomes: targeted predictions of outbreaks, timely recommendations for prevention and control, and reports on effectiveness of medical responses. These will enable healthcare professionals, health data scientists, government authorities to make informed decisions and to plan early and efficiently. Patients will receive better treatment and care. All leads to less negative and dramatic impacts in our general public.
